page_title: Sphericon
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Sphericon / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Drawings of a two half-discs device for generating a meaner motion and of a Sphericon, taken from the original patent filed by David Hirsch.
context_page_description: The sphericon is a solid that has a continuous developable surface with two congruent semi circular edges, and four vertices that define a square. It is a member of a special family of rollers that, while being rolled on a flat surface, bring all the points of their surface to contact with the surface they are rolling on. It was discovered independently by carpenter Colin Roberts in the UK in 1969, by dancer and sculptor Alan Boeding of MOMIX in 1979, and by inventor David Hirsch, who patented it in Israel in 1980.
context_section_description: In 1969, Colin Roberts (a carpenter from the UK) made a sphericon out of wood while attempting to carve a Möbius strip without a hole.
  In 1979, David Hirsch invented a device for generating a meander motion. The device consisted of two perpendicular half discs joined at their axes of symmetry. While examining various configurations of this device, he discovered that the form created by joining the two half discs, exactly at their diameter centers, is actually a skeletal structure of a solid made of two half bicones, joined at their square cross-sections with an offset angle of 90 degrees, and that the two objects have exactly the same meander motion. Hirsch filed a patent in Israel in 1980, and a year later, a pull toy named Wiggler Duck, based on Hirsch's device, was introduced by Playskool Company.
  In 1999, Colin Roberts sent Ian Stewart a package containing a letter and two sphericon models. In response, Stewart wrote an article "Cone with a Twist" in his Mathematical Recreations column of Scientific American. This sparked quite a bit of interest in the shape, and has been used by Tony Phillips to develop theories about mazes, and is also used as a logo and name by the Israeli research company Sphericon Ltd.
caption: Drawings of a two half-discs device for generating a meander motion, and of a sphericon, taken from the original patent application filed by David Hirsch.
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